• PC World
• » Software
• » Office

When Microsoft introduced workgroup tools to its Office 2000 suite in early 1999, our verdict was "Good idea, bad execution." Two years later, we can sum up our take on Office XP's updated group features--newly dubbed SharePoint Team Services--as "Looking better, but still rough around the edges." SharePoint fixes some of the problems that plagued Office 2000's collaboration features, and introduces a few useful tools. But too many gotchas remain for us to give SharePoint an unqualified thumbs-up.

First, a definition: SharePoint isn't an Office application. Rather, it's a set of Web-based services you use in conjunction with the regular applications in Office. Small organizations that want to use SharePoint will likely need to subscribe to it through a third party that hosts the service. (Some ISPs and Web-hosting companies such as Interland and Verio plan to offer this service, but prices weren't set at press time.) Larger businesses equipped with Windows 2000-based servers can set up their own SharePoint server; the necessary software will be bundled with FrontPage 2002, which itself is available as a stand-alone product or as part of Office XP's Professional Special Edition and Developer versions.

Instant Team HQ

SharePoint Team Services provide workgroups with a ready-made, password-protected online home, complete with folders for shared documents. Members of the workgroup can save documents to a SharePoint folder from within Office XP's apps (and from within their Office 2000 predecessors, for that matter), or use the Web browser to upload a file created in any application. SharePoint's built-in search engine performs full-text indexing of uploaded files on the fly, so it's easy for team members to locate documents by searching for relevant keywords. And because everything's browser-based, you can get to your group's documents from any Net-connected PC.

But while these document-management features offer a simple alternative to using a traditional file server, they won't meet every organization's needs. Most notably, you can't nest folders within each other--for instance, putting a Forecasts folder inside a Budget folder that's inside a folder called Finance--which limits your ability to neatly organize myriad documents in a logical fashion.

Still, SharePoint does many things that an ordinary file server can't. Discussion Boards let you carry on threaded conversations with coworkers, and you also get a shared calendar and address book. One of the most intriguing features is instant surveys: You can set up quick questionnaires to poll your group on any subject. It's easy to set up a poll with multiple questions, drop-down menus, checkboxes, and other features, and the results can be either confidential or open to all.

Feel Like You're in Control

One of the things that made Office 2000's team features less than compelling was their inflexibility. You had very little control over your site's look and feel, and you couldn't grant different visitors varying levels of privileges--so that, for instance, one team member could add new topics and delete old ones, while another could only participate in existing discussions.

SharePoint Team Services gives you far more freedom to tailor your site to your group's needs. It's reasonably simple to tinker with many aspects of the site, such as the links on its front page and the columns of information it displays in the document folders, discussions, and elsewhere. Don't like Microsoft's standard blue-and-white color scheme? You can apply other schemes with a few clicks, although you'll need to use FrontPage to do so.

Unlike Office 2000's team tools, SharePoint also lets you specify individual access privileges for each user. These features don't let you lock certain users out of confidential sections of the site--say, a document folder that holds accounting spreadsheets. But it's reasonably easy to create multiple SharePoint sites with varying degrees of security, then link them together.

Office XP Leaves Room for Improvement

Even though some SharePoint features show a lot more polish than their predecessors, others are surprisingly rudimentary. For instance, Subscriptions--which alert you by e-mail when information on a SharePoint site changes--remain a nifty idea that's too crudely implemented to be very useful. The big problem: The e-mailed subscription notifications you receive are still frustratingly cryptic. They don't tell you what information was edited, added, or deleted--only where and when the change took place, and who made it. It can even be difficult to figure out whether the change happened in a document folder, in the shared calendar, or somewhere else on the site.

For a service that's touted as an integral part of Office XP, SharePoint also misses some obvious opportunities for integration with the suite's apps. As with Outlook 2002, SharePoint sites provide a place to share contacts, appointments, and tasks; serious Outlook users will likely want a way to shuttle information back and forth with SharePoint. But this process is far from seamless--for instance, you can only export SharePoint contacts to Outlook one contact at a time. (If you export a group of contacts, it gets saved as an Excel 2002 spreadsheet.) And while you can import Outlook contacts into a SharePoint site, this feature doesn't work if a contact's e-mail address field is blank.

Glitches and gotchas like this are all the more annoying because the basic notion behind SharePoint is so solid. Anyone who's ever tried to collaborate with coworkers via workgroup software knows that it's virtually impossible unless the tools are both useful and easy to learn--if they aren't, the software simply goes unused. SharePoint Team Services that were just a little more refined would be a truly effective workgroup solution for many Office users. Here's hoping Microsoft sticks with them--and gets them right next time around.

• See more like this:
• office,
• xp,
• sharepoint team services,
• collaboration,
• tools,
• windows,
• microsoft,
• workgroup,
• groupware